FORWARD OBSERVER

Torture Logic

Mon. Jun 16, 2008


With President Bush out of the way and assuming the Democrats retain their majorities, Congress next year should have no trouble outlawing torture with no ifs, ands or buts attached.

The presumptive presidential nominees, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., favor an outright ban. Hopefully the new president will go beyond banning torture by any U. S. government entity and take additional steps to help Americans who fall into enemy hands.

The Bush administration has made it easy for a terrorist group to tell a captured American: "Your government has said it is all right to torture us; why shouldn't we torture you?"

The torturer could go on and quote any number of statements by Bush administration officials to justify brutalizing American captives.

For example, they could read from former Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, who wrote in the infamous "Torture Memo" to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2002 that "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

And even on up the food chain, Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have championed coercive questioning of suspected terrorists in words that captors could throw back at American captives.

In short, there is a lot of poison Bush and his deputies threw in the well which, if not neutralized by Congress and the new president, will increase the risk of American captives of today and tomorrow being tortured.

Bush, who joined the National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam; Cheney, who got a series of draft deferments to keep himself from being sent to Vietnam because, as he told me right after he became Defense Secretary, "I had other priorities," and Rumsfeld, who never flew in combat, all have talked tough about how to get information out of terrorists.

But none of them has ever been waterboarded or otherwise tortured.

I have come to know some genuinely tough soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines during my years of covering the military who have been tortured in captivity. The enemy torturers broke every one of them, forcing them to make anti-America statements to stop the excruciating pain. These brave men felt so depressed after breaking that several attempted suicide.

My Exhibit A for contending that the new president should do more than the present one to ease the plight of American prisoners is Vice Adm. James Stockdale, who died in 2005.

I got to know him and his family well. He was imprisoned in Hanoi, North Vietnam, from 1965 to 1973 and tortured relentlessly. He beat his own face to a pulp one day so he could not be put on camera in prison to make anti-American statements.

Yet he eventually broke and did his captors' bidding to stop the excruciatingly painful torture.

Stockdale told me after his release that he felt he had disgraced himself by failing to live up to the military's code of conduct and would have to spend the rest of his life hiding behind a high hedge he would put around the family farm. To his utter amazement, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics in prison camp.

Exhibit B is Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher, another genuinely tough guy who graduated from Boy's Town and behaved heroically while imprisoned by the North Koreans in 1968. But, in contrast to Stockdale, Navy admirals recommended that Bucher be court-martialed because he gave up the thinly armed spy ship USS Pueblo to the North Koreans.

Bucher told me the North Korean gunboats surrounding him would have mowed down his crew if he had not surrendered the ship. Also, he had been assured by Navy superiors that warships and or planes would come to his rescue if his "research" ship were attacked.

Bucher took beating after beating rather than sign anti-American statements. He broke only after the North Koreans threatened to shoot every one of his crewmen he had saved, starting with the youngest, in front of him.

The injuries inflicted by his North Korean torturers compounded as he grew older, forcing him in his last years to get around in a wheelchair.

With bitterness, he told me that he never got the chance to tell his side of the story to Congress. He called for a review of the military's code of conduct which most troopers think expects them to tell their captors only name, rank, service number and date of birth. Bucher died in 2004 a broken man.

Either President Obama or McCain need to reduce the incentive for terrorists and others to torture their American captives.

One easy way to do this is for the new president and his deputies, including generals and admirals, to say over and over again that any anti-American statements made by American prisoners will be discounted as the product of torture.

Also, in this new age the real battle is the battle for men's minds.

This increases the temptation for the bad guys to torture Americans into making anti-American statements. This reality dictates that the military issue a more realistic and forgiving code of conduct for service people so they don't feel guilty about breaking under torture.

by George C. Wilson

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